Flex Your Future
When I was little, all adults asked children the same question: âWhat do you want to be when you grow up?â Kids were trained to answer this. We picked something and stuck to it. I wanted to be a vet. My best friend Katie wanted to be an astronaut. Another kidâand this begs its own set of questionsâwanted to be Pretty Woman. The idea was, as children, we were not yet our true selves. At some point weâd be âgrown-upâ and, at that moment, our identity would crystallize. The floaty bits of us would snap into focus and weâd solidify into the person we were meant to be. And weâd stay that same self. Our careers would be our identities. I would be a vet. Vet-ness would run through me like a stick of hard candy.
Iâm not a vet. The closest I ever came to being one was having a dog. The question was flawed from the start. Adults still ask it, but Iâve noticed that children tend to answer âI donât knowâ these days. My daughter tells me she thinks itâs a stupid question. âIt changes all the time, Mommy. How can we know?â
Sheâs rightâhow can we know? Independent forecaster the Institute for the Future predicted that almost half of todayâs jobs may be replaced by automation in the next twenty years.38 Some jobs, like accountants, cashiers, call center operators, bank tellers, and pharmacists, may become extinct. And 80 percent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 havenât even been invented yet. Who knows what these might be? Drone traffic controllers? End-of-life coaches? Telesurgeons? Techno-ethicists? Asking children to nail their ambitions down to a job that may no longer exist is nonsensical.
None of us can plan our lives forensically and rationally. There is no perfect route forward, with all the stars aligned. We donât know whatâs comingâmaybe we never have, but now we really donât.
Globally, life spans are increasing, our working lives are getting longer, and weâre facing a multitude of transitionsâin love, in jobs, in lifeâalong the way. This uncertainty opens up a whole new way of seeing life. This is not a time for definitive, rigid ten-year plans. Itâs a time for continual education, skilling and reskilling, side-hustling, and career pivotsâall of which require flexibility to adapt to new circumstances. Itâs a time, as Oprah said, to âstep into the new story you are willing to create.â
In this chapter, I will look at what longer life spans, new life paths, and the march of artificial intelligence mean for the way we live and work. Iâll look at how we can listen to our intuition and make decisions that pivot us in new directions. And Iâll explore why flex is so important to future-proof ourselves, and live happy, fulfilled, long lives.
PLOT TWIST! LETTING GO OF LIFE STAGES
No one knows the amount of time each of us has left on this earth. What is undeniable is that we are living longer. In the 1840s, British people lived, on average, until they were forty. Thatâs roughly my age as I write this. Today, more than one in four children born in the UK can expect to reach 100. In France, it is one in two.
With these longer lives stretching out ahead of us, blocks of time associated with distinct life stages are swapping and muddling together. Older people are going back to school and retraining. Younger people are leapfrogging higher education and becoming entrepreneurs. Marriage and children are delayed, or outright rejected. People of different ages and levels of experience will be studying, working, socializing together.
What is clear is that life is no longer a three-act play with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. It doesnât start with education, continue with work, and end with retirement. Rather, itâs a collage of time hops and plot twists, a mishmash of experimentation and adaptation. So we need to let go of rigid assumptions of what young adulthood, midlife, and older age are about.
Careers, today, are not for life. Todayâs learners will have eight to ten jobs by the time they are thirty-eight. This trend has been termed the âquitting economy,â and it involves switching between jobs as a way to get higher wages, accumulate experience and contacts, and avoid the stagnation of a fixed path. Quitting is no longer âfor losersâ; it is a shrewd way to get ahead, to continually reinvent and resell yourself.
THE RISE OF THE SIDE HUSTLE
According to a recent report called The Side Hustle Economy, as many as one in four adults are side-hustling, and these hustles generate income worth ÂŁ72 billion for the UK. Emma Gannon, author of The Multi-Hyphen Method, says it is working for her: âThe ability to have more flexible working, to work on my own side projects, add different themes and strands to my work and personal identity . . . have all added to my own personal definition of success.â39
This capacity for reinvention is also expressed in the rise of side projects. These have been termed âside hustlesâ and are usually defined as a small business or supplementary job on top of a main career to boost income, fulfill a passion, or both.
Some worry about this more flexible approach to working and blame it on a generational lack of loyalty. They say young people are always looking for something new, always obsessed with whether they feel âfulfilled.â But to view it like this is to misunderstand the game. Itâs not just out of choice. They are quitting and switching jobs and side-hustling because they have to.
Todayâs young people are at risk of being the first generation since the Second World War to earn less than their parents. It is the precariousness of this changing world that forces young people to adapt and shape-shift in order to keep on the front foot. Without the safety net and economic buoyancy of their parentsâ generation, they have to flex. And these skills will become more and more crucial for them as they age and the job market continually changes shape.
As people approach their forties, the markers of adulthood their parents bought into are becoming fainter and fainter. People arenât following the traditional grown-up script as much anymoreâbuying property, getting married, having children. They complain about having to âdo adulting.â Badges of rebellion that used to signify youth are now the preserve of the middle-aged. A survey suggested that almost a quarter of forty- to fifty-nine-year-olds have a tattoo somewhere on their body, compared with under one in six of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. They donât want to grow up and settle down, and even if they did, they canât afford to.
THE DECLINE OF âADULTâ MILESTONES
The ultimate symbol of settling down, homeownership, is out of reach for the majority today. It is declining globally as house prices are rising in every major city and incomes are not keeping up. A 2017 report published by estate agents Knight Frank predicted that almost one in four households in Britain will be renting privately by the end of 2021 because of unaffordable house prices and stagnant wages.40
Numbers of child-free adults are on the rise. Figures show that nearly one in five women in England and Wales in their late forties have no childrenâcompared to one in ten of their mothersâ generation.41
So midlife is no longer about âsettling down.â And older age is not about slowing down, either.
My dad is eighty-one, an accountant, and works a four-day week. My mother is running a cafĂ© at seventy-six. Both of them are relentless hard workers. Neither of them believes in retirement, which they equate with cardigans, golf, and the slow path to death. They barely believe in weekends. They are part of the zeitgeist. Today, the retirement age is increasing, people are working for longer, and they donât appear to be slowing down.
RETHINKING RETIREMENT
In the UK in 1948, the basic state pension age was sixty-five for men and sixty for women. Which made sense; at the time, life expectancy was sixty-six for men and seventy for women.
Life expectancy is much higher today, and pension costs are spiraling. The UK government is increasing the age at which you can claim a state pension to sixty-six from 2020, and the plan is to raise it to sixty-seven by 2028. In addition to this, Office for National Statistics figures show that since 1992, the number of people working beyond sixty-four years of age in the UK has doubled, and more than half of people aged seventy and over who are still working are self-employed.42
Boomers who have paid off their mortgages and have decent retirement savings want to spend their money on experiences, for example traveling internationally and going on adventure holidays. And itâs not just leisureâthey are starting businesses too.
They are also divorcing, finding love in later life, and staying sexually active. In fact, incidents of sexually transmitted infections among the over-sixties have increasedâso much so that PornHub, the online pornography platform, has released a sex-ed campaign aimed at the elderly (and they are giving away VHS copies or DVDs to those who are less internet savvy).
Believe the stats, and you paint a picture of a seventy-year-old sexually active entrepreneur with wanderlust. Not someone playing golf in a cardigan.
So these are the demographic and cultural changes that are flexing our life paths. At the same time, the march of technology is creating new futures: of work, of education, of how we live our lives.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & WHAT IT REALLY MEANS TO BE HUMAN
The World Economic Forum calls todayâs technological changes the âFourth Industrial Revolutionâ: life-changing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and 3D printing.
These are incredible leaps forward and will improve our lives in many ways, yet they make us uneasy. A deep anxiety of our time is whether artificial intelligence will not only take our jobs but also make us redundant as humans.
In 2018, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, got up in front of the companyâs annual developer conference, held in Mountain View, California. Live on stage, he demonstrated how their artificial intelligence system, Google Assistant, could book a haircut. The tech community was blown away. It wasnât the task itself; we expect AI to start shouldering some of our dull, everyday tasks. What was jaw-dropping was how Google Assistant did it. The bot made a phone call to the hair salon, with a voice pattern so human, complete with âmm-hmms,â pauses, and chitchat, that the receptionist at the salon had no idea she was talking to a robot. If she had, would she have questioned whether that robot was coming after her own job?
For some of us, it might be sooner rather than later.
Googleâs Ray Kurzweilâa man Bill Gates calls âthe best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligenceââbelieves that humans will be outpaced by machines in 2029. That is, in 2029, the first com...
